The Internal Revenue Service of God Text: Proverbs 21:2
Introduction: The Age of the Crooked Ruler
We live in a time that worships at the altar of authenticity. The highest virtue is to be "true to yourself." The cardinal sin is to be judgmental, which is to say, to suggest that there might be an objective standard of truth or morality outside of the glorious, sovereign self. Our entire culture is a frantic, industrial-scale manufacturing plant for self-justification. We have convinced ourselves that sincerity is a substitute for righteousness. As long as you are sincere, you can be sincerely wrong, and God is somehow obligated to grade on a curve. As long as your intentions are good, as you define good, then the outcomes do not matter. We have all become our own supreme courts, and we have a stunning record of never losing a case.
Every man has become his own pope, issuing infallible decrees from the throne of his own heart. We have taken the ruler that God gave us, the straight-edge of His law, and we have broken it over our knee. Then we picked up one of the crooked pieces, declared it to be the new standard, and are now busy measuring everything and everyone else with it. And what a surprise, we always measure up. The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, and we are living in a generation of fools who are congratulating one another on their excellent eyesight.
This is not a new problem. This is the oldest lie in the book, whispered in the garden. "Did God really say?" which was quickly followed by "You shall be as gods." The essence of the fall was the desire to be our own standard, to define good and evil for ourselves. And so we find ourselves in the world that project has built. A world of mass confusion, where everyone is right in their own eyes, and therefore no one can tell anyone else they are wrong about anything that matters.
Into this festival of self-congratulation, the book of Proverbs drops a twenty-ton block of granite. It is a reality check from on high. It tells us that our internal polling data is rigged. It tells us that our self-assessment is not the final assessment. There is another set of eyes. There is another standard. There is a final audit, and it is conducted by God Himself.
The Text
Every man’s way is right in his own eyes,
But Yahweh weighs the hearts.
(Proverbs 21:2 LSB)
The Universal Self-Justification Racket (v. 2a)
The first clause of this proverb is a statement of universal spiritual reality. It is a diagnosis of the human condition apart from grace.
"Every man’s way is right in his own eyes..." (Proverbs 21:2a)
Notice the scope of it. "Every man." This is not just talking about the pagan, the atheist, or the scoundrel down the street. This is talking about you. This is talking about me. This is the default setting of the fallen human heart. We are all born with a brilliant, Harvard-trained lawyer living in our heads, and his only client is us. And he has never lost a case. Whatever we do, whatever we want, whatever we say, this internal attorney is there to file a brief instantly, arguing that our way is not just acceptable, but right.
The "way" of a man refers to his path, his conduct, his entire course of life. And the verdict we render on our own conduct is always "not guilty." We are masters of the fine print. We are experts in extenuating circumstances. We grade our own motives with a generosity we would never extend to others. When someone else does something, we judge their actions. When we do the same thing, we judge our intentions, which our internal lawyer has already helpfully relabeled for us as "basically good."
This is why Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick (Jer. 17:9). It is so deceitful that it successfully deceives itself. We are both the con man and the mark. We build our own funhouse, walk into it, and then marvel at how tall and handsome the distorted mirrors make us look. This self-deception is the necessary anesthetic for a life of sin. You cannot continue to live in rebellion against a holy God without telling yourself a steady stream of lies about what you are doing. Sin requires a soundtrack of self-justification.
The Divine Audit (v. 2b)
But the proverb does not end there. If it did, we would be left in a relativistic swamp, with every man's opinion being as good as the next. But the second clause crashes in like a thunderclap, bringing the objective, terrifying, glorious reality of God into the picture.
"...But Yahweh weighs the hearts." (Proverbs 21:2b LSB)
This "but" is one of the most important words in all of Scripture. It is the great pivot from human opinion to divine fact. It is the collision of our subjective fantasy with God's objective reality. You can believe your way is right all you want. You can get all your friends to agree with you. You can write books about it, and start a movement. But. But Yahweh. The covenant Lord of heaven and earth has His own assessment, and His is the only one that counts.
And notice what He examines. Man looks at his "way," his outward actions, and approves them. God goes deeper. He "weighs the hearts." The Hebrew word for "weighs" means to test, to measure, to assess against a standard. God puts the heart itself on the divine scales. He is not just interested in what you did; He is interested in why you did it. He is the great assayer of motives. He is the Internal Revenue Service of the soul, and this is the audit that no one can escape. He sees past the carefully curated public image, past the polished rhetoric of our self-defense, and He weighs the very source of our actions, the desires and intentions of the heart.
And what does He find when He weighs the natural human heart? He finds it wanting. Every time. The scales of divine justice are balanced with the infinite weight of God's own holiness. When our hearts are placed on the other side, they fly up, lighter than vanity (Psalm 62:9). This is the great problem that this proverb presents. We are inveterate self-justifiers, but we have to stand before a God who cannot be fooled, and whose standards are perfect. Our crooked ruler is useless in His courtroom.
The Only Heart with Any Weight
If the sermon ended there, we would all be driven to despair. If every man's way is right in his own eyes, but wrong in God's, and God is the final judge of the heart, then every man is condemned. And this is precisely the point. The wisdom of Proverbs, like the law of Moses, is a great schoolmaster. It is designed to beat us down, to strip us of our self-righteousness, to silence our inner lawyer, and to make us cry out for a mercy we do not deserve.
This proverb slams the door on salvation by self-effort. It demolishes any hope of standing before God on the basis of our own sincerity or our own good intentions. It forces us to look for a righteousness that is outside of ourselves. It forces us to look for a man whose way was not only right in His own eyes, but was right in the eyes of His Father. It forces us to look for a man whose heart was weighed by Yahweh and found to be infinitely weighty, perfectly righteous, and utterly pure.
And of course, there is only one such man. The Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only one who could say, "I always do the things that are pleasing to Him" (John 8:29). His heart was weighed in the wilderness, it was weighed in Gethsemane, and it was weighed on the cross, and it was never found wanting.
The Great Exchange
And here is the heart of the gospel. This is the good news that answers the bad news of our self-deceit. In the great exchange of the cross, God takes our hearts, which are weighed and found to be lighter than nothing, and He sets them aside. And in their place, He credits to our account the infinite weight and worth of the heart of His Son. He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).
This is justification by faith alone. It is not that God helps us fix our scales. It is not that He gives us tips on how to add a little more moral weight to our hearts. He declares us righteous, not because our hearts have become righteous, but because He has given us the righteousness of Christ. He looks at those who are in Christ, and when He weighs their hearts, He is weighing the heart of His Son.
And this changes everything. Once we are justified by faith, God then begins the process of sanctification. He gives us a new heart, a heart of flesh for a heart of stone (Ezek. 36:26). The Holy Spirit begins to work in us, so that our "way" actually begins to conform to God's way. We stop trusting our own eyes and we start trusting His Word. We begin to look at our lives not with the flattering funhouse mirror of self-justification, but with the clear, sharp mirror of God's law. And when we see our sin, we no longer need our internal lawyer to get us off the hook. We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous (1 John 2:1). We can agree with God about our sin, confess it, and find that He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So the Christian life is a process of learning to distrust our own eyes, and to trust God's scales. It is a daily repentance from the pride of the first half of this proverb, and a daily flight to the grace offered in the gospel that answers the second half. Stop measuring yourself with your own crooked stick. Let the Word of God be your plumb line. Let the cross of Christ be your confidence. For it is only there that a man whose way is all wrong can be made all right in the eyes of God.